Post by shmeep on Nov 14, 2005 7:52:43 GMT -5
Under the Gun
Nighttime at the squad and Jim seems to be leaving work late. Standing at his locker—the one that never seems to be in the same place twice—and were the lockers always black? I’ll have to check that out—Jim stuffs some things into the gym bag we’ve never seen him take to work before. Among the items being stuffed? His gun.
Jim’s looking mighty fine in his black leather jacket, so I can only assume the fancy suit he wore to work that day is wadded up in the bottom of that bag. And maybe that’s where he’s keeping Hank, too.
Slipping the bag onto his shoulder, Jim takes advantage of his moment of privacy and assumes the stance of a man dancing with an imaginary partner.
The ubiquitous strains of “Call Me Irresistible” floating through his mind, he starts to step step turn…right into Tom.
Dance stance is gone and Jim seems bent on reclaiming his dignity. “Hello?” he says, wondering how much has just been witnessed. “Yo, Jim,” Tom responds. “Tom?” Awkward but polite chatter. Tom asks straight out about dance class. More awkward chatter and…good night. But Jim turns back. “Hey, Tom?” he begins. Tom is one step ahead of him. “Yeah, I won’t tell anybody I saw that.” Jim nearly sighs with relief. “Cool. Thanks.”
Possibly my favorite teaser of the series. We need the levity because the rest of the episode is T E N S E! I couldn’t sleep after watching it for the first time because I still felt nervous for Jim every time I thought about it.
Things aren’t going so well for the Dunbars at dance class. They can’t quite step in sync—and that same song is still playing. Christie watches Jim nervously, seeming to expect him to screw up at any moment.
“You’ve got to let the man lead,” Instructor Lady says, fulfilling her role by hitting us over the head with the exact meaning of the whole dance metaphor. “You’re back-leading,” she tells Christie.
“Thank you,” Jim says triumphantly. Then, to Christie, “that’s what I was saying, Sweetie.”
“And you,” Instructor Lady says to Jim. “You’re crowding her. You’ve got to give her room to move.”
Who needs Galloway when they have Instructor Lady to clarify all their problems for them? She floats off and Jim and Christie start bickering—metaphorically? Perhaps.
“All right,” Jim says. “Easy with the arm. We’re not wrestling.”
“I’m letting you lead,” Christie insists. “The problem is that you’re not giving me any room.”
This looks like it could start to get ugly, but then Instructor Lady offers to show them each the step separately and Jim and Christie, in sync at last, both turn to her and say, “No!”
“We can do it,” Jim tells her. “We can work it out.”
Satisfied, Instructor Lady offers one last sage, marriage-saving bit of advice. “I would like you to breathe together,” she tells them with a gesture that makes her look like she’s trying to pull the breath out of their bodies with her hands.
Mr. and Mrs. Dunbar end up in a restaurant full of noisy people. An annoying guy in a plaid shirt throws something at a man who is obviously not enjoying the revelry and then delivers possibly the worst line of the entire series. “Mr. Eastman, come on. Relax already. It’s a party, ya hump ya! Huh?”
Fed up with the bad dialogue, Jim tells Christie to call the manager. He doesn’t ask. He tells. (I notice this in particular in this episode.) It’s a party for a mismatched couple who have just announced their engagement. Christie doesn’t seem all that bothered by the ruckus and she tries to distract Jim by describing how uncomfortable the bride’s family looks.
Annoying Plaid Guy notices her look and makes a rude comment. That’s it. The second Jim realizes his wife has been insulted, he’s off, ready to protect her honor—whether she wants him to or not.
The confrontation quickly escalates into a full-on brawl (notice Christie in the background shrieking and running away) with people from the two families jumping each other while Jim ends up with some guy in a stranglehold.
“Jimmy, are you okay?” Christie asks when it’s safe for her to come out from where she was hiding.
“I’m okay,” Jim says, then in his bossy voice, “Get my bag.”
I actually really like Christie in this scene—her concern for Jim, the way she searches for the bag and the way she immediately grasps the seriousness of the situation when Jim tells her the gun is inside. She can’t find it. The police arrive and Jim plots to get Karen over there to help.
At the squad, Jim gets the other detectives up to speed about the gun while the cameraman seems to have some weird fixation with getting close-up’s of Jim’s right hand beside Marty’s left hand. Are they trying to emphasize that Marty hasn’t worn his wedding ring since “In Your Face”? I know this show is nuanced, but geez! I guess Marty’s backstory is implied. (Fine. The real reason for this unusual shot was probably to show how Jim's nervousness was being betrayed by the jittery movements of his hand. Very effective, because it made me more jittery just watching it. But...isn't it more fun to imagine they're trying to tell us Marty was having marital trouble? I'm just saying...)
Marty asks the tough questions, naturally. Why did Jim have the gun in the bag?
“I went straight from work to dance class with my wife,” Jim explains patiently, “and then straight from dance class to dinner.”
Not to obsess about this again, but…where was Hank?? If Jim had time to leave Hank somewhere, couldn’t he have dropped off his bag? Or just left the gun in his locker at work? I don’t get why he had to take it home with him. I would love for someone to come up with a plausible explanation for this plot contrivance. It will make me sleep better at night.
All this gun talk feeds right into Marty’s old beef about Jim carrying one to begin with.
“Is that really the issue right now?” Karen asks.
Marty does a Dunbar-esque face shrug. “Maybe.”
But he’s not being jerky about it. He offers to help and the whole squad backs him up even when Jim offers to let them all off the hook by going to Fisk with the situation.
Jim and Karen visit the father of the groom—the patriarch of the less “desirable” of the two families. Jim admits his gun was in the gym bag and is cut off with—
“You carry a gun?” Then, to Karen, “He carries a gun?”
“Yeah,” Karen says in a fiercely protective voice. “He’s a detective.”
“He’s blind! What, you drive yourself here today too? In what, in like a bumper car?”
The squad is called to a homicide, where Josh Krist is found, shot in the head with what could have been a .38—same as Jim’s gun. Jim immediately starts fretting, hoping this homicide is not related to his missing gun.
“I’d be worried too,” Tom tells Marty when Jim is out of earshot.
“Didn’t I call this?” Marty can’t resist asking Tom. “Hmm? Day one?”
Marty never felt comfortable about the gun, so I think he shows a lot of restraint in this episode, offering most of his I-told-you-so’s to Tom when Jim isn’t there. He doesn’t seem happy to be right, as he might have before coming to respect Jim, but he does want his rightness to be known.
Now this murder is more important than finding the gun. Marty tracks down the victim’s family. “…the mother’s on vacation at some ecological resort in Mexico. I don’t know what that is.” Heh. I just like that little Marty moment.
But they can multitask and are now looking into the gun and the murder simultaneously—and hoping the two are not related.
Marty and Tom interview Tyler Mills, friend of the victim. Tyler admits his friend did some drugs, but not more than anyone else. “So he was just a choir boy about to get his first Nobel peace prize,” Marty sums up. I’m loving the mood Marty is in today! Tyler gives up Freeze, Josh’s drug dealer who had cut him off because Josh had started asking suspicious questions.
In the snazzy office of Mr. Eastman, Karen and Jim are still trying to find out who took the gun, but Mr. Eastman won’t cooperate because he’s a dick.
And still the tension builds. At the squad, a man from Internal Affairs goes to see Fisk.
Silence. Everything seems to freeze and the other detectives look from Jim to the apparently serious conversation taking place within Fisk’s office. Jim is pale. Marty looks at Jim with—and this surprises me too—compassion.
“All right,” Jim says, breaking the silence. “You guys had nothing to do with this. I did this all on my own.”
Karen tries to protest, but Jim cuts her off. “No no no. Come on. I don’t want to hear an argument. That’s it.”
Karen starts to argue. “We don’t even know if—”
Fisk’s door opens and he and the guy from Internal Affairs exit, looking very serious. More tension. Tom hangs up the phone he had been holding, shaking his head.
“What’s up, Boss?” Marty asks.
“Gotta move my car,” Fisk says. “I blocked him in.”
This sinks in and everyone gives in to the humor of the moment. Even Jim gets there, although a second behind the others. He puffs out his cheeks, runs a hand over his mouth and then is able to smile.
A narcotics detective who is in awe of Jim—and is slightly pleased to meet Karen too, since she’s standing right there and he doesn’t want to be rude—is in a lot of trouble because he had unofficially turned Josh into a snitch, which may have caused his death. It seems Josh had been making tapes of his drug deals…
While Marty is being denied access to the DOA’s room by his mother on the phone, Tom takes Jim aside to tell him that Mr. Eastman’s daughter attends the same upscale academy as the victim. “Oh, man,” Jim says, looking close to panicky—for Jim. Karen and Marty approach and Jim tells them there’s a good chance his gun killed that kid. “What are we doing?” Fisk asks. They all wheel around to face him, looking a little guilty.
Luckily, Marty is quick. “The DOA’s mom won’t give us permission to search his room so we’re talking about putting some muscle to the doorman.” It’s all so convincing and natural! “What about calling the D.A. and getting a warrant first?” Fisk asks, not suspecting anything is amiss. So it’s settled and they get a warrant.
Jim and Karen ride out to Hoity-Toity academy—encountering some odd ziz-zaggy traffic and people who cross streets moving like South Park characters—and meet with the Eastman girl, who is exactly as helpful as her father and doesn’t know anything about Josh Krist or the gun. Back at the squad, Tom confirms that the slug found in the DOA was from a .38. The others go to search Josh’s room, but Jim stays behind to come clean with Fisk.
“We both know there’s an unspoken rule about not telling your boss something that’ll come back and bite him in the ass,” Jim begins, causing Fisk to eye him with alarm. “The whole plausible deniability thing.”
“You got a big problem,” Fisk says after Jim tells him about the gun.
“Yes I do,” Jim says, then he goes on to explain that his gun might have been used on their DOA.
“Is there anything else to suggest your gun might be the murder weapon?” Fisk asks.
“I don’t know,” Jim says frankly. “At this point, I don’t know which way is up.”
Fisk gives Jim until the end of the day to find his gun. He makes it clear that this could be used as ammunition for all those people who are still against Jim working as a detective, despite how well Fisk tells them Jim is doing. Jim’s job could be in jeopardy if the gun isn’t found or if it was the gun used in the homicide.
What a great bookend this scene is to the first scene between Jim and Fisk in the pilot with Jim cocky and stubborn, trying to prove himself, and Fisk doubting and disgruntled at being saddled with Jim in the first place. Now we can see how far they have come with each other. Jim is humbled and admitting his vulnerability and Fisk is supportive, trusting, but laying out harsh truths neither of them can avoid. Beautiful moment.
The others search Josh’s room. “You know,” Marty says. “I just gotta say it. Every time I wanna give it up to Dunbar for being a good detective, I look on his hip and I see that gun and I wonder what the hell he’s thinking.”
“We’re looking for audio tapes, right Marty?” Karen asks.
He ignores her. “Am I wrong?” he asks Tom.
“You’re not wrong,” Tom admits.
Karen finds the tapes inside a fake can of shaving cream and the squad tries to figure out what is being said through all the background noise. Jim feels pretty certain one of the voices is that of Tyler Mills. He recognizes it from having heard it for a moment when Tyler came to the squad.
“I have good ears,” Jim tells Tyler, who claims not to be able to understand what’s on those tapes either. They wear him down.
“He was recording me?” Tyler asks in disbelief—great bit of acting there, by the way. It comes out that he had been at the deal that went south and that he knew who had used Josh’s gun to shoot Josh. More tension as Jim imagines where that gun could have come from.
Marty gets into a really bad mood during the interview with Damon Long, the accused shooter. They begin with Tom taunting him with how unbelievable he will be in court with his priors when compared with Tyler Mills and his “fluffy sweater” and congressman uncle. “So I have to admit to something I didn’t do?” Damon asks. “You did it!” Marty yells, banging his hands down on the table and then facing Damon, fists clenched, furious.
“You think I think that Howdy Doody punk in the other room put a cap in his friend’s head?” he shouts. Is this the first full-blown temper tantrum we get to see from Marty? He’s a lot scarier in this moment than he was in the locker room in Seoul Man—in my opinion. They get their confession and find out where to find the gun. It’s a little touching that even Marty and Tom seem more excited about possibly finding Jim’s gun than about getting a murder confession.
They go after the gun—and it isn’t Jim’s. He’s relieved but, “it means that mine is still out there,” he says.
Only one hope left. Jim sets up a meeting with the two unpleasant patriarchs from opposite sides of the tracks and tries to get them to give up the gun.
“After I got shot,” he begins, sunglasses off, joining them at the table, “and I lost my sight, I had to go up against a lot of opposition in order to keep my job as a cop. And I had to work twice as hard to get the department to allow me to carry a gun. Now, maybe you think I have about as much right to carry a gun as I do drive a car, but that’s my job. That’s who I am. And if I don’t get my gun back, I’m gonna lose my job. So if either of you could help me to retain it, I would be very grateful.”
The line about his rights is what always gets me at this point. How hard it must be for Jim to have to say that he no longer has the right to drive a car—something any sixteen-year-old kid has the right to do.
He tells them he will be waiting at a coffee shop alone at 5:30 for someone to drop off the gun.
Before leaving, Jim has a heart-to-heart with Karen, setting up that even if he gets to keep his job, he may have to give up the gun and—
Karen knows where he’s going and beats him to it. Would she still be his partner? She brings up how he had saved her at the Lyman house.
Okay. Bad example. He saved her with his gun. Um… “Look,” she says, “you know how to solve cases and sometimes the way you do it leaves me impressed. That’s the kind of person I want to work with. So, yeah. I’d still be your partner no matter what.” Jim does his cheek-puff of relief when Karen leaves and then goes to wait at the coffee shop.
Okay, now I’m really T E N S E. The music and that weird strobe light effect—not to mention that loud woman on the phone behind Jim. He checks his watch.
It’s almost 6 o’clock and still no gun and I’m on the edge of my seat, hoping someone comes through for him. Okay, I already know what happens, but this part is so well done I still feel it when I’m watching. That annoying voice on the cell phone nearly makes Jim lose it. You can see how it stresses him out. And then that great moment when he turns and says, “Will you shut the f—” clever edit, but we all know how he finished that sentence.
Then a shadowy shape we can’t quite make out drops a paper bag on Jim’s table and skadaddles.
Who is it? If Jim doesn’t know, why should we? I love that. I believe it was an Eastman. Why? Just a gut feeling. I could be wrong, but I disliked the Eastmans slightly more.
Jim can’t quite believe what has happened. He takes the gun out to make sure it’s what he thinks it is, then it takes a moment to fully register.
Ultimate cheek-puff of relief!
I guess getting the suit back too would be asking too much...
“Today scared the hell out of me,” Jim says to the bottle of beer he’s turning to for comfort.
No, wait. He’s talking to Christie, who reminds him that everything worked out. Easy for her to say! She asks Jim if he’s considered not carrying a gun.
Jim’s face gets all tight and he shakes his head. “You know,” he says, sounding strained. “I’ve had to give up so many things already, and each time I do it, I feel like I’m drifting further and further away from who I am.”
“But maybe that’s just acceptance,” Christie says, not seeming to feel the stab to the gut Jim’s words cause me to experience. But she makes sense and seems to know now isn’t the time to let Jim go into self-pity mode.
“Yeah,” Jim says. “When does it end? And—and when it does, what’ll I have left?”
“You know, you’ve come a lot farther than you realize. And for the cop that you’ve become, maybe you don’t need a gun anymore.”
Then she comes up with the solution to all Jim’s problems. A bath after dance class…
What the hell? Do they have dance class every night? Seriously. They just had class the night before and Christie originally signed them up for six lessons. How does that work?
“I don’t want to go to dance class tonight,” Jim says. “Mommy,” he’s probably tempted to add, going by the whine in his voice.
“Jimmy,” Christie says, pulling Jim to his feet. “If you feel like you’re losing things, why not add things in their place?”
“Like dancing?” he asks sarcastically.
“Yes,” she says, going into a dance position with him.
It’s that song again! Good lord! But Jim and Christie seem to be dancing pretty well together. Well, better than they have been. Until Jim trips spectacularly.
Christie and Instructor Lady rush to him to make sure he’s all right. Does he want to rest? No, he wants to dance.
“Are you sure?” Christie asks.
Jim smiles. “Yeah.”
They resume their dance, this time in sync. Christie looks worried for a moment, but as they relax and she sees that Jim’s heart is in the dancing, she smiles at him. A look of utter adoration that almost makes up for having to see the Dunbars dancing yet again.
Nighttime at the squad and Jim seems to be leaving work late. Standing at his locker—the one that never seems to be in the same place twice—and were the lockers always black? I’ll have to check that out—Jim stuffs some things into the gym bag we’ve never seen him take to work before. Among the items being stuffed? His gun.
Jim’s looking mighty fine in his black leather jacket, so I can only assume the fancy suit he wore to work that day is wadded up in the bottom of that bag. And maybe that’s where he’s keeping Hank, too.
Slipping the bag onto his shoulder, Jim takes advantage of his moment of privacy and assumes the stance of a man dancing with an imaginary partner.
The ubiquitous strains of “Call Me Irresistible” floating through his mind, he starts to step step turn…right into Tom.
Dance stance is gone and Jim seems bent on reclaiming his dignity. “Hello?” he says, wondering how much has just been witnessed. “Yo, Jim,” Tom responds. “Tom?” Awkward but polite chatter. Tom asks straight out about dance class. More awkward chatter and…good night. But Jim turns back. “Hey, Tom?” he begins. Tom is one step ahead of him. “Yeah, I won’t tell anybody I saw that.” Jim nearly sighs with relief. “Cool. Thanks.”
Possibly my favorite teaser of the series. We need the levity because the rest of the episode is T E N S E! I couldn’t sleep after watching it for the first time because I still felt nervous for Jim every time I thought about it.
Things aren’t going so well for the Dunbars at dance class. They can’t quite step in sync—and that same song is still playing. Christie watches Jim nervously, seeming to expect him to screw up at any moment.
“You’ve got to let the man lead,” Instructor Lady says, fulfilling her role by hitting us over the head with the exact meaning of the whole dance metaphor. “You’re back-leading,” she tells Christie.
“Thank you,” Jim says triumphantly. Then, to Christie, “that’s what I was saying, Sweetie.”
“And you,” Instructor Lady says to Jim. “You’re crowding her. You’ve got to give her room to move.”
Who needs Galloway when they have Instructor Lady to clarify all their problems for them? She floats off and Jim and Christie start bickering—metaphorically? Perhaps.
“All right,” Jim says. “Easy with the arm. We’re not wrestling.”
“I’m letting you lead,” Christie insists. “The problem is that you’re not giving me any room.”
This looks like it could start to get ugly, but then Instructor Lady offers to show them each the step separately and Jim and Christie, in sync at last, both turn to her and say, “No!”
“We can do it,” Jim tells her. “We can work it out.”
Satisfied, Instructor Lady offers one last sage, marriage-saving bit of advice. “I would like you to breathe together,” she tells them with a gesture that makes her look like she’s trying to pull the breath out of their bodies with her hands.
Mr. and Mrs. Dunbar end up in a restaurant full of noisy people. An annoying guy in a plaid shirt throws something at a man who is obviously not enjoying the revelry and then delivers possibly the worst line of the entire series. “Mr. Eastman, come on. Relax already. It’s a party, ya hump ya! Huh?”
Fed up with the bad dialogue, Jim tells Christie to call the manager. He doesn’t ask. He tells. (I notice this in particular in this episode.) It’s a party for a mismatched couple who have just announced their engagement. Christie doesn’t seem all that bothered by the ruckus and she tries to distract Jim by describing how uncomfortable the bride’s family looks.
Annoying Plaid Guy notices her look and makes a rude comment. That’s it. The second Jim realizes his wife has been insulted, he’s off, ready to protect her honor—whether she wants him to or not.
The confrontation quickly escalates into a full-on brawl (notice Christie in the background shrieking and running away) with people from the two families jumping each other while Jim ends up with some guy in a stranglehold.
“Jimmy, are you okay?” Christie asks when it’s safe for her to come out from where she was hiding.
“I’m okay,” Jim says, then in his bossy voice, “Get my bag.”
I actually really like Christie in this scene—her concern for Jim, the way she searches for the bag and the way she immediately grasps the seriousness of the situation when Jim tells her the gun is inside. She can’t find it. The police arrive and Jim plots to get Karen over there to help.
At the squad, Jim gets the other detectives up to speed about the gun while the cameraman seems to have some weird fixation with getting close-up’s of Jim’s right hand beside Marty’s left hand. Are they trying to emphasize that Marty hasn’t worn his wedding ring since “In Your Face”? I know this show is nuanced, but geez! I guess Marty’s backstory is implied. (Fine. The real reason for this unusual shot was probably to show how Jim's nervousness was being betrayed by the jittery movements of his hand. Very effective, because it made me more jittery just watching it. But...isn't it more fun to imagine they're trying to tell us Marty was having marital trouble? I'm just saying...)
Marty asks the tough questions, naturally. Why did Jim have the gun in the bag?
“I went straight from work to dance class with my wife,” Jim explains patiently, “and then straight from dance class to dinner.”
Not to obsess about this again, but…where was Hank?? If Jim had time to leave Hank somewhere, couldn’t he have dropped off his bag? Or just left the gun in his locker at work? I don’t get why he had to take it home with him. I would love for someone to come up with a plausible explanation for this plot contrivance. It will make me sleep better at night.
All this gun talk feeds right into Marty’s old beef about Jim carrying one to begin with.
“Is that really the issue right now?” Karen asks.
Marty does a Dunbar-esque face shrug. “Maybe.”
But he’s not being jerky about it. He offers to help and the whole squad backs him up even when Jim offers to let them all off the hook by going to Fisk with the situation.
Jim and Karen visit the father of the groom—the patriarch of the less “desirable” of the two families. Jim admits his gun was in the gym bag and is cut off with—
“You carry a gun?” Then, to Karen, “He carries a gun?”
“Yeah,” Karen says in a fiercely protective voice. “He’s a detective.”
“He’s blind! What, you drive yourself here today too? In what, in like a bumper car?”
The squad is called to a homicide, where Josh Krist is found, shot in the head with what could have been a .38—same as Jim’s gun. Jim immediately starts fretting, hoping this homicide is not related to his missing gun.
“I’d be worried too,” Tom tells Marty when Jim is out of earshot.
“Didn’t I call this?” Marty can’t resist asking Tom. “Hmm? Day one?”
Marty never felt comfortable about the gun, so I think he shows a lot of restraint in this episode, offering most of his I-told-you-so’s to Tom when Jim isn’t there. He doesn’t seem happy to be right, as he might have before coming to respect Jim, but he does want his rightness to be known.
Now this murder is more important than finding the gun. Marty tracks down the victim’s family. “…the mother’s on vacation at some ecological resort in Mexico. I don’t know what that is.” Heh. I just like that little Marty moment.
But they can multitask and are now looking into the gun and the murder simultaneously—and hoping the two are not related.
Marty and Tom interview Tyler Mills, friend of the victim. Tyler admits his friend did some drugs, but not more than anyone else. “So he was just a choir boy about to get his first Nobel peace prize,” Marty sums up. I’m loving the mood Marty is in today! Tyler gives up Freeze, Josh’s drug dealer who had cut him off because Josh had started asking suspicious questions.
In the snazzy office of Mr. Eastman, Karen and Jim are still trying to find out who took the gun, but Mr. Eastman won’t cooperate because he’s a dick.
And still the tension builds. At the squad, a man from Internal Affairs goes to see Fisk.
Silence. Everything seems to freeze and the other detectives look from Jim to the apparently serious conversation taking place within Fisk’s office. Jim is pale. Marty looks at Jim with—and this surprises me too—compassion.
“All right,” Jim says, breaking the silence. “You guys had nothing to do with this. I did this all on my own.”
Karen tries to protest, but Jim cuts her off. “No no no. Come on. I don’t want to hear an argument. That’s it.”
Karen starts to argue. “We don’t even know if—”
Fisk’s door opens and he and the guy from Internal Affairs exit, looking very serious. More tension. Tom hangs up the phone he had been holding, shaking his head.
“What’s up, Boss?” Marty asks.
“Gotta move my car,” Fisk says. “I blocked him in.”
This sinks in and everyone gives in to the humor of the moment. Even Jim gets there, although a second behind the others. He puffs out his cheeks, runs a hand over his mouth and then is able to smile.
A narcotics detective who is in awe of Jim—and is slightly pleased to meet Karen too, since she’s standing right there and he doesn’t want to be rude—is in a lot of trouble because he had unofficially turned Josh into a snitch, which may have caused his death. It seems Josh had been making tapes of his drug deals…
While Marty is being denied access to the DOA’s room by his mother on the phone, Tom takes Jim aside to tell him that Mr. Eastman’s daughter attends the same upscale academy as the victim. “Oh, man,” Jim says, looking close to panicky—for Jim. Karen and Marty approach and Jim tells them there’s a good chance his gun killed that kid. “What are we doing?” Fisk asks. They all wheel around to face him, looking a little guilty.
Luckily, Marty is quick. “The DOA’s mom won’t give us permission to search his room so we’re talking about putting some muscle to the doorman.” It’s all so convincing and natural! “What about calling the D.A. and getting a warrant first?” Fisk asks, not suspecting anything is amiss. So it’s settled and they get a warrant.
Jim and Karen ride out to Hoity-Toity academy—encountering some odd ziz-zaggy traffic and people who cross streets moving like South Park characters—and meet with the Eastman girl, who is exactly as helpful as her father and doesn’t know anything about Josh Krist or the gun. Back at the squad, Tom confirms that the slug found in the DOA was from a .38. The others go to search Josh’s room, but Jim stays behind to come clean with Fisk.
“We both know there’s an unspoken rule about not telling your boss something that’ll come back and bite him in the ass,” Jim begins, causing Fisk to eye him with alarm. “The whole plausible deniability thing.”
“You got a big problem,” Fisk says after Jim tells him about the gun.
“Yes I do,” Jim says, then he goes on to explain that his gun might have been used on their DOA.
“Is there anything else to suggest your gun might be the murder weapon?” Fisk asks.
“I don’t know,” Jim says frankly. “At this point, I don’t know which way is up.”
Fisk gives Jim until the end of the day to find his gun. He makes it clear that this could be used as ammunition for all those people who are still against Jim working as a detective, despite how well Fisk tells them Jim is doing. Jim’s job could be in jeopardy if the gun isn’t found or if it was the gun used in the homicide.
What a great bookend this scene is to the first scene between Jim and Fisk in the pilot with Jim cocky and stubborn, trying to prove himself, and Fisk doubting and disgruntled at being saddled with Jim in the first place. Now we can see how far they have come with each other. Jim is humbled and admitting his vulnerability and Fisk is supportive, trusting, but laying out harsh truths neither of them can avoid. Beautiful moment.
The others search Josh’s room. “You know,” Marty says. “I just gotta say it. Every time I wanna give it up to Dunbar for being a good detective, I look on his hip and I see that gun and I wonder what the hell he’s thinking.”
“We’re looking for audio tapes, right Marty?” Karen asks.
He ignores her. “Am I wrong?” he asks Tom.
“You’re not wrong,” Tom admits.
Karen finds the tapes inside a fake can of shaving cream and the squad tries to figure out what is being said through all the background noise. Jim feels pretty certain one of the voices is that of Tyler Mills. He recognizes it from having heard it for a moment when Tyler came to the squad.
“I have good ears,” Jim tells Tyler, who claims not to be able to understand what’s on those tapes either. They wear him down.
“He was recording me?” Tyler asks in disbelief—great bit of acting there, by the way. It comes out that he had been at the deal that went south and that he knew who had used Josh’s gun to shoot Josh. More tension as Jim imagines where that gun could have come from.
Marty gets into a really bad mood during the interview with Damon Long, the accused shooter. They begin with Tom taunting him with how unbelievable he will be in court with his priors when compared with Tyler Mills and his “fluffy sweater” and congressman uncle. “So I have to admit to something I didn’t do?” Damon asks. “You did it!” Marty yells, banging his hands down on the table and then facing Damon, fists clenched, furious.
“You think I think that Howdy Doody punk in the other room put a cap in his friend’s head?” he shouts. Is this the first full-blown temper tantrum we get to see from Marty? He’s a lot scarier in this moment than he was in the locker room in Seoul Man—in my opinion. They get their confession and find out where to find the gun. It’s a little touching that even Marty and Tom seem more excited about possibly finding Jim’s gun than about getting a murder confession.
They go after the gun—and it isn’t Jim’s. He’s relieved but, “it means that mine is still out there,” he says.
Only one hope left. Jim sets up a meeting with the two unpleasant patriarchs from opposite sides of the tracks and tries to get them to give up the gun.
“After I got shot,” he begins, sunglasses off, joining them at the table, “and I lost my sight, I had to go up against a lot of opposition in order to keep my job as a cop. And I had to work twice as hard to get the department to allow me to carry a gun. Now, maybe you think I have about as much right to carry a gun as I do drive a car, but that’s my job. That’s who I am. And if I don’t get my gun back, I’m gonna lose my job. So if either of you could help me to retain it, I would be very grateful.”
The line about his rights is what always gets me at this point. How hard it must be for Jim to have to say that he no longer has the right to drive a car—something any sixteen-year-old kid has the right to do.
He tells them he will be waiting at a coffee shop alone at 5:30 for someone to drop off the gun.
Before leaving, Jim has a heart-to-heart with Karen, setting up that even if he gets to keep his job, he may have to give up the gun and—
Karen knows where he’s going and beats him to it. Would she still be his partner? She brings up how he had saved her at the Lyman house.
Okay. Bad example. He saved her with his gun. Um… “Look,” she says, “you know how to solve cases and sometimes the way you do it leaves me impressed. That’s the kind of person I want to work with. So, yeah. I’d still be your partner no matter what.” Jim does his cheek-puff of relief when Karen leaves and then goes to wait at the coffee shop.
Okay, now I’m really T E N S E. The music and that weird strobe light effect—not to mention that loud woman on the phone behind Jim. He checks his watch.
It’s almost 6 o’clock and still no gun and I’m on the edge of my seat, hoping someone comes through for him. Okay, I already know what happens, but this part is so well done I still feel it when I’m watching. That annoying voice on the cell phone nearly makes Jim lose it. You can see how it stresses him out. And then that great moment when he turns and says, “Will you shut the f—” clever edit, but we all know how he finished that sentence.
Then a shadowy shape we can’t quite make out drops a paper bag on Jim’s table and skadaddles.
Who is it? If Jim doesn’t know, why should we? I love that. I believe it was an Eastman. Why? Just a gut feeling. I could be wrong, but I disliked the Eastmans slightly more.
Jim can’t quite believe what has happened. He takes the gun out to make sure it’s what he thinks it is, then it takes a moment to fully register.
Ultimate cheek-puff of relief!
I guess getting the suit back too would be asking too much...
“Today scared the hell out of me,” Jim says to the bottle of beer he’s turning to for comfort.
No, wait. He’s talking to Christie, who reminds him that everything worked out. Easy for her to say! She asks Jim if he’s considered not carrying a gun.
Jim’s face gets all tight and he shakes his head. “You know,” he says, sounding strained. “I’ve had to give up so many things already, and each time I do it, I feel like I’m drifting further and further away from who I am.”
“But maybe that’s just acceptance,” Christie says, not seeming to feel the stab to the gut Jim’s words cause me to experience. But she makes sense and seems to know now isn’t the time to let Jim go into self-pity mode.
“Yeah,” Jim says. “When does it end? And—and when it does, what’ll I have left?”
“You know, you’ve come a lot farther than you realize. And for the cop that you’ve become, maybe you don’t need a gun anymore.”
Then she comes up with the solution to all Jim’s problems. A bath after dance class…
What the hell? Do they have dance class every night? Seriously. They just had class the night before and Christie originally signed them up for six lessons. How does that work?
“I don’t want to go to dance class tonight,” Jim says. “Mommy,” he’s probably tempted to add, going by the whine in his voice.
“Jimmy,” Christie says, pulling Jim to his feet. “If you feel like you’re losing things, why not add things in their place?”
“Like dancing?” he asks sarcastically.
“Yes,” she says, going into a dance position with him.
It’s that song again! Good lord! But Jim and Christie seem to be dancing pretty well together. Well, better than they have been. Until Jim trips spectacularly.
Christie and Instructor Lady rush to him to make sure he’s all right. Does he want to rest? No, he wants to dance.
“Are you sure?” Christie asks.
Jim smiles. “Yeah.”
They resume their dance, this time in sync. Christie looks worried for a moment, but as they relax and she sees that Jim’s heart is in the dancing, she smiles at him. A look of utter adoration that almost makes up for having to see the Dunbars dancing yet again.
